What did the Soviet people eat? Inna Metelskaya-SheremetyevaWhat did we eat in the USSR. recipes for all time

What was fed in the USSR or myths about healthy food

Dreams about tea sausage

Every poor country has disgusting food. This is the law, it works everywhere without exception, unless, of course, the country is so poor that people are fed from the land. Russia has become significantly poorer over the past couple of years. However, our people, contrary to common sense, began to praise the food. Many are convinced that fresh Abkhazian tangerines, fat domestic milk and natural Belarusian cottage cheese finally got on their table.

They are on the move heavy tools of self-hypnosis that turn greenhouse Chinese tomatoes into fragrant Krasnodar ones. The person who praises Rossiyskiy cheese in 2016 has previously done complex psychological work with himself. We have become fashionable to pretend that you understand food. And knowingly "savor" repeatedly thawed Argentine beef. Maybe people are ashamed that they, not having had time to get to know the taste of real food, again switched to compound feed.

Shame makes you keep your face to the last.

Processes the consciousness of Russians even more nostalgia. An insidious trap: a man, it would seem, misses the times when he was young, fresh and in a hurry to his own wedding, and in the end, his feelings are reduced to longing for saltpeter sausage and crushed tomatoes.

If Russia today is only slipping into poverty, then Soviet Union was a poor country. And the poor don't eat well. And they didn't eat.

Today, Russia is approaching the Belarusian ones in terms of the quality of products. And this is a fall, not an increase.

The same nostalgia for the cake helps to survive it "Potato". If you try to make cottage cheese or yogurt from the Belarusian milk bought on the market or in the "farm" store, you are unlikely to succeed. Also, it will not work to ferment real milk with Belarusian yogurt or sour cream.

It is not surprising, because the production of raw milk in Belarus is growing sharply every year, and since 2000 the number of livestock has been at the level of 4.3-4.4 million heads. On the other hand, imports of milk, cream, condensed milk and palm oil from the European Union, Asia, and Latin America have improved. And exports skyrocketed.

The Belarusians themselves, by the way, are not happy with their products and prefer to buy goods in Poland, Lithuania or Latvia - all sorts of "bags" create long traffic jams at the border.

Because Belarusians know: their products are the most Soviet, and manufacturers are responsible with their heads not for quality, but for the plan.

My mother taught merchandising in Soviet times. From an early age, I spent my free time in my mother's classes. Or at the lectures of her colleagues who taught food technology, accounting and reporting of a grocery store. I honed my reading skills on collections of food GOSTs.

Few people know that Soviet food standards, firstly, had notes indicating the possibility of replacing one ingredient with another. Secondly, GOSTs were changed frequently, for some types of products even twice a season, depending on the crop and milk yield. Thirdly, products for domestic use and for export were made according to different GOSTs. So, for export sausages, it was forbidden to use any packaging films, except for cellophane.

Varied List phosphates, nitrates And nitrite also used only in sausage for the domestic market- for example, sodium phosphate one-substituted 2-water, which is also used as a laxative and as a component of glass washing liquid. A common component of washing powders, sodium tripolyphosphate was also put in sausage. To preserve the color, sodium and potassium nitrates were used - unconditional carcinogens. Boiled sausages and sausages were allowed to contain 5 thousand mg of nitrites per kilogram - when frying, they turned into toxins.

The list of "improvers" and substitutes in sausages alone was huge. GOSTs officially allowed the use of cheek meat, boiled hooves, bladders, cow passages in sausages instead of trimmed meat ...

Each type of sausage was accompanied by a note indicating the possibility of replacing the ingredients: trimmed mutton for lean meat in volume up to 15%, meat in beef sausage for trimmed pork - up to 20%, buffalo and yak meat instead of beef - up to 100%, old sausages, sausages and sausages were allowed to be put in fresh ones, extracts were allowed to be used instead of natural spices, salt boiled bones and plasma were allowed to replace the meat mass, up to 10% of the sausage could consist of cuts of old smoked meats.

And finally, the final and most important note in sausage GOST 23670-79, as amended in 1980, says that “instead of beef, pork, mutton, the joint use of a protein stabilizer, mass of meat beef, or pork, or mutton, food plasma (serum) of blood, starch or wheat flour is allowed”.

And this is just one GOST. And there were hundreds of them. And thousands of technical specifications, according to which most food products were produced. According to TU, oil for frying chips was replaced once every eight months.

"Birch juice" for kindergartens was sweetened water with vitamins.

The Soviet GOST 240-85 for margarine, cooking and combined fats will tell about the quality of confectionery products, which made it possible to produce fats from the same palm oil, palm stearin, cotton palmitin. And palm oil was then much lower purity.

cakes "Potato", cake "Log" according to specifications, they were prepared from scraps, crumbs, marriage of biscuits and cookies with the addition of cooking oil and cocoa powder substitute. Cake and candy "Bird's milk" were also prepared according to TU from a variety of substitutes. There were no GOSTs with agar-agar, cocoa butter and natural eggs for Bird's Milk; today they are invented by culinary bloggers who make money on longing for the Soviet system. The current producers of "GOST" chocolates make money on it. Pure business on blind nostalgia.

People yearn for the chocolate icing made from combi fat, which they were sold for the price of modern truffles.

Ice cream, about which the patriots moan so loudly today, was produced according to GOST only until 1966, and after that it began to be produced according to specifications, and there were years when each republic had its own specifications for ice cream, depending on the situation with the dairy industry. According to TU, ice cream was made from vegetable fats, combined fat, starch and flour were added instead of agar-agar, and in the early 1980s, creamy ice cream varieties were replaced with dairy ones: creamy ice cream remained only in Moscow and Leningrad, but no one was going to feed the province fat.

There were not six or eight varieties of ice cream in the provinces, as in the capitals, but one or three.

In the south of Russia, there were regions where, since the 1970s, no ice cream was sold outside the regional centers, except for tomato, because all dairy products from agricultural regions were exported cleanly to Moscow. In Tyumen, the third kind of ice cream (milk popsicle) appeared only in the late 1980s, and before that there were only milk in a glass and milk on a stick. The second channel on TV, by the way, also appeared only at the end of the Union, before that they got by with the first one.

It must be said that GOSTs and even THAT were not indicative of product quality. Theft and deceit in the Soviet food industry and trade were widespread. And sometimes at the official level.

At large sausage factories there were conventional workshops with cheek sausage, meat-and-bone boiled meat and bladders and gostovsky workshop, who worked for special rations, the Beryozka store and the OBHSS, from this workshop came products for bribes and control. In smaller factories, they simply launched different lines. For example, two shifts with double capacity produced starched sausage, and the third, at night, drove the Gost standard.

Dairy products, which, by the way, were also powder and with vegetable fats, mercilessly diluted and stolen.

Milk was diluted even on the collective farm, then on the way to the dairy, on the way from the factory to the store, in the store.

Sour cream was diluted with diluted milk according to the same scheme, if necessary, compensating for the losses with starch. Sour cream in which there is a spoon is not sour cream, but starch porridge: in normal sour cream, a spoon should not stand. People who yearn for a spoonful of sour cream simply did not see anything good in Soviet life. Because then everyone stole.

The theft of products by weight was so massive that the state put up with it and introduced the concept "natural loss", hoping that the thieves will leave at least a little to the people. Different commodities were allowed different levels of attrition, up to 20% , it included shrinkage, shrinkage, beating, spoilage, marriage, refusal and theft.

But steal more: they legally collected cream and fatty sour cream, cut off hams from chickens, cut from a shoulder blade, carried away fresh fruits in the amount of permissible loss, and then took them in excess of the norm and also diluted, weighed them down, pumped them up with water. The trick about weighting chickens with water was not invented in retail chains - it was discovered even under the king.

And how much did such joy cost? A liter of sour cream in the central zone cost one and a half rubles, in remote regions - 1 ruble. 65 kop. A liter of milk - 48-50 kopecks. Creamy ice cream in Moscow until the mid-1980s cost 19 kopecks, and such a miracle as milk ice cream cost 21 kopecks at the borders of the homeland.

Sweets with condensed milk, molasses and fudge made from vegetable oils with cocoa waste such as "Petrel", "Pilot", "Swallow" cost 3 rubles in the third price zone. 40 kop. Allegedly, chocolates such as "Masks" and "Rillage in Chocolate" cost up to 15 rubles. Soup sets - 1.5 rubles, meat that has never been on sale - 2.5 rubles. Meat on the market 7 rub.

A few percent of the population could afford to buy goods in the market. With a good Soviet salary in 120 rub.

Do not listen to those who say that Soviet people earned 250-400 rubles each. Only elite intellectual workers, miners, shift workers-geologists had such money. In 1976 39% population of the country, or almost 100 million people, lived in villages and villages, where a good salary was 60-80 rub. Grassroots intelligentsia in the countryside received up to 100 rub., in the city - 110-130 rub. per month.

In 1965, the Central Research Economic Institute of the State Planning Commission of the RSFSR revealed that 73,51% citizens by income did not reach the poverty line, earning less 65 rub. per month. In 1970, the average salary, combined from the salaries of a milkmaid and a Stakhanovist miner, in the Union was 122 rub., and the median, that is, the most common, - 98 rub. The tariff scale had coefficients: the farther from Moscow the cashier of the same savings bank lived, the less he earned.

The salary of an average specialist was enough for 6,5 kg of "chocolate" sweets or 10 kg of good meat. Fortunately, they were almost never on sale, I didn’t have to be upset.

People ate little, bought little by little. My mother, who had to go to stores on the other side of the counter, recalls that people bought sweets of 100-150 grams at most. In paper bags.

Cheese - 150 g each, butter - 50-60 g each. On the day of receiving pensions, old women came to the grocery store - "for butter". So that the staff would not have ideological conflicts with everyday life, they were explained at trade union meetings that the Soviet person prefers to buy a little, but fresh.

The government then faced the task at any cost punch people in the belly. Stearin, starch and bone decoctions were used. To prevent citizens from stretching their legs, if possible, vitamin-mineral complexes were added to the products. The same as for livestock.

From the provinces to Moscow and Leningrad, they raked out all the edible stocks, leaving the outback to queue for the Chayna sausage and sweets-pillows. Prices, as they moved away from the capital, grew, the whole country was divided into three price zones, prices were indicated on many goods at once for three belts.

Moscow did not pay attention to this, and the provinces quickly forgot that they lived from hand to mouth. And today it is desperately torn into poverty, to the Soviet "birch" sap and cubes of combined fat.

Kitchen according to GOST. Sovietfood

Revealing secrets. Food. Sausage in the USSR, sausages were made to last

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“Do not make a cult out of food,” advised Kise Vorobyaninov, a relic of a dark past, a hero of his time, content with little for the sake of a well-fed future. And, perhaps, if the Soviet counters were bursting from the abundance of products, there would be no cult. But in a country where queues lined up for any food, and in order to set the festive table, it was necessary to get up on the hunting trail a month before the celebration, the cult of food could not be avoided.
At first, Komsomol enthusiasts suggested the following scenario: we don’t cook at home, we eat in competently and in a new way organized public canteens, we spend our free time on self-education, sports, culture and party meetings. This state of affairs could suit a young man and not burdened with a family. So most of the population continued to stand in lines, not waiting for the flourishing of a prosperous cultural life. The 1920s in the USSR were contrasting: now open famine, then the NEP, then again the search for food.
However, at the head of the food department, which was first called the Commissariat of Internal and Foreign Trade of the USSR, then the Commissariat of Supply and the Commissariat of the Food Industry of the USSR, was a real lover of life, who understood the joys of life - Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan. He began work on modernizing equipment, adopting foreign experience, and expanding the food basket. The pages of pre-war cookbooks are full of quotes from his speeches. Here, for example: “... in 1933, Comrade Stalin asked me a question: “Do they sell live fish somewhere here?” “I don’t know,” I say, “probably they don’t sell it.” Comrade Stalin continues to ask: “Why don’t they sell? It happened before." After that, we pressed on with this business and now we have excellent stores, mainly in Moscow and Leningrad, where they sell up to 19 varieties of live fish. Including, and such as sterlet, trout; sell in the best stores and live crayfish and oysters. Live fish in the store! This is good, because there are lovers who demand that the fish be not only fresh, but that it should be alive in the pan. Well, for their taste, we have an assortment of fish.”
For most of the 40s, people received a set of basic products in the USSR on cards. When they were abolished in 1947, there was no abundance. In general, it never happened again in the USSR. Cookbooks of the 50s and 60s focus mainly on rational nutrition. At the same time, a new type of store appears - "Cooking", where you can buy semi-finished products and then cook food without touching the cutting board and meat grinder. It is "Culinaria" that is the symbol of what they ate in the USSR. Let there be an exorbitant amount of bread in cutlets, and goulash and azu can be both the first and second freshness - but this is a real gift for a woman who is at work from 9 to 6, and after 6 - in the kitchen. Housewives in the USSR were not particularly respected, and therefore they ate modestly, but inventively.
Culinary ingenuity was greatly facilitated by the Rabotnitsa magazine, which taught its readers from month to month how to cook something out of nothing and turn chaos into space. This became especially relevant in the 70s-80s, when a total shortage could destroy the culinary skills of the highest class. Processed cheese, carrots and herring - a strange combination of products? But from this set you can cook red caviar. Fake, of course. But this is all Soviet food: blue chickens, black potatoes, wet and rotten onions, huge, like saleswomen in the sweets department, cakes with rich cream, tea with chips of unknown origin. It never failed, except perhaps bread - for 70 years it remained the main product and food in the USSR.

Daria Gorobtsova

Cafe "Swallow". Presumably 1956

Remember the frame from the film "The Diamond Arm": at night, Semyon Gorbunkov hugged his wife with his plastered arm.

Sen, have you seen Sophia Loren?
- No.
- Did you drink Coca-Cola?
- Yes.
- And How?

Here the hero twisted his face, they say, nothing special. But, oddly enough, it was this drink that could become popular in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1930s, People's Commissar of the Food Industry Anastas Mikoyan went to the United States for three months to study how capitalist catering was organized. He brought home 25 hamburger machines and an industrial recipe for Coca-Cola. The people's commissar planned to put these two American inventions into mass production in the USSR, but the war prevented it.

But it was hamburgers that were taken as a model when they came up with our cutlets, and cola - in the production of factory kvass. By the way, self-service canteens and grocery stores, canned tomato juice and quick freezing products Mikoyan also spied on the Americans.

OUR SANDWICH IS THE BEST SANDWICH IN THE WORLD

The word "sandwich" is of German origin, but in Germany they don't understand our sandwiches. The fact is that only we came up with the idea of ​​spreading bread with butter first, and then putting a slice of sausage / ham and / or cheese on it. It’s quite exotic for an unprepared foreigner to spread bread thickly with mashed potatoes or millet porridge, as the Soviet boy did in Viktor Dragunsky’s story “What Mishka Loves”.

SOVIET PRODUCTS PERFORMED QUICKLY

Bread, buckwheat, sausage, butter, minced meat. In the USSR, these products had a pronounced and very pleasant smell, which has disappeared today. The bread was stale, and the butter did not thaw at room temperature as quickly as it does now.

But ice cream, on the contrary, melted faster and had more calories: then starch and flour were used as a stabilizer, while gum and sodium salt are added today. “Fortunately (or unfortunately), many modern products are much less prone to rotting, souring and other natural destruction, which makes us think about the naturalness of the products themselves,” notes author of the book “Public catering. Mikoyan and Soviet Cuisine" Irina Glushchenko.

FOR THE SECOND WILL BE PORRIDGE, AND FOR THE SWEET - COMPOTE

The chief nutritionist in the USSR was Professor Manuil Isaakovich Pevzner. He categorically did not recognize spices and frying, he believed that the cuisine in the USSR should be "healthy and calm." Therefore, boiled meat, pasta, rice, cheesecakes, milk porridges, chicken broths and jelly were taken as the basis for the dishes of the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. That is ... Jewish kosher cuisine.

Manuil Pevzner also insisted that breakfast should always be hot, and lunch should consist of soup, a meat or fish dish with a side dish of cereals and vegetables, and a “third” in the form of compote or jelly. Dinner - again something meat or fish with vegetables. This three-time diet with a three-part lunch (in children's and medical institutions there was another afternoon snack) was not practiced anywhere else in the world. Pevsner also developed the famous 15 dietary tables, which are still used in clinical nutrition.

WHAT THE SOVIET PEOPLE WILL EAT, ONE PERSON DECIDED

All the same Anastas Mikoyan tasted the products before they were launched to the masses. If he did not like the food, she had no chance of getting on the table with Soviet citizens. Fortunately, the People's Commissar, who was brought up in the Caucasian culinary traditions, had a good taste.

Many varieties of sausages, including "Doctor's", "Mikoyan" cutlets, sausages with green peas, condensed milk, stew, ice cream and even canned asparagus - all this appeared in the USSR during the People's Commissar's Food Administration. Some of these products are still on sale today, others are gone forever. For example, margaguselin- under this mysterious word was margarine with the smell of goose fat.

KIEVSKI CUTLETS - A MASTERPIECE OF THE USSR

One of the most popular places of leisure for Soviet people was a restaurant, on the menu of which, almost always, a list of the most expensive hot dishes was crowned with cutlet in Kiev. In the Kiev restaurant "Dynamo" after the monetary reform of 1961, it cost 1 ruble 25 kopecks. In the 60s, Kiev cutlet was on the menu of almost all restaurants in Kiev, but only in a few of them it was prepared and served correctly: with a complex side dish on a crouton (specially prepared cracker).

Among them - "Dynamo", "Capital", restaurants of hotels "Moscow" and "Leningrad". But in the restaurant "Teatralny", on the corner of Lenin and Vladimirskaya streets, they did it best, scrupulously following all the rules. But time passed, and the technology for making Kiev cutlets began to be simplified. In industrial production, chicken fillet began to arrive already without a bone. And in some establishments, fillets and other remaining parts of the chicken began to be passed through a meat grinder altogether. Well, then broiler chickens came into play. And now they began to cook three cutlets from immobile fat broilers, instead of two from the right chicken, which led a free lifestyle.

But the recipe for real cutlets in Kiev. Two fillets are removed from the breast, the wing is chopped off at the shoulder bone. Preparation of fillets for a semi-finished product was necessarily carried out on a marble table. From the “troika” knife, the second knife cut off the lower film covering the fillet. The inner vein and film were removed from the small fillet. The shoulder bone was cleaned, and the joint at the junction with the fillet was necessarily chopped off at an angle.

If you leave it, the cutlet in this place will turn out to be damp. The fillet was upholstered with a special tool called a chopper, in the same place, on the table. From the butter, previously beaten with this chopper to the elasticity of plasticine, a thirty-gram “bullet” was made, which was placed on the beaten main fillet. From above they covered with a minion and gave a pear-shaped shape. For breading, a dry loaf or wheat bread was peeled and grated to crumbs.

The cutlet, which had already been shaped, was crumbled for the first time in breadcrumbs, dipped in lyson (eggs beaten with salt), then again in breadcrumbs. And so twice. Then the semi-finished product was lowered into a special deep fat (half vegetable oil, half animal) at a temperature of 180-185 degrees for 3-5 minutes.

After the cutlet was taken out with a slotted spoon and placed in the oven at a temperature of 240-280 degrees. They kept her there for about seven to ten minutes until a chaff formed on top, which was a sign of her readiness.

"POLESIE" - A NEW YEAR'S GIFT TO CHERNIGOV CITIZENS

At the end of the 50s, a large number of canteens, cafes appeared in Chernihiv region (as a rule, they were located near bus and railway stations and as one were called "Vstrecha" or "Zustrich"), as well as restaurants. In the regional center in 1951 appeared famous restaurant "Desna". For some reason, according to the documents, this institution had the status of a cafe, but in fact it was a restaurant.
The restaurants "Ukraine" and "Chernihiv" were also well-known among Chernihiv residents. The latter, after reconstruction, became known as "Old Chernihiv".

A notable event in the city was the appearance on Lenin Street (now Mira Avenue) of the Polesie shopping complex. Its doors opened to Chernihiv residents on the last day of the outgoing 1966. Newspapers of that time wrote: "Polesie" is a series of shops - radio products and televisions, photographic products and watches, gifts and cooking. On the second and third floors there is a dining room and a cafe. The entire fourth floor was occupied by a cozy restaurant.

It should be noted that visiting restaurants at that time was not considered a luxury. Dinner at a table for four could fit into the amount of no more than 100 rubles.

Also, Chernihiv residents willingly visited the cafes of the city. The most popular were "Swallow" on the Val and "Desniansky Khvili" on the Alley of Heroes. These catering establishments have not survived to our times. It's a pity, old-timers say, there were unusually tasty lemonade and ice cream.

Restaurant "Desna". 1951

Restaurant "Ukraine". January 1962

Andrey Dimich, photo from the home archive of Konstantin Yagodovsky, weekly "Slovo Chernihivshchyna", No. 16

The new film of the TV company "MIR" is called "The Pursuit of Tasty in the USSR". Olya Syutkina and I have repeatedly participated in these stories from the Made in the USSR series. So this time, the journalists invited me, along with other colleagues, to tell how everything was then, in the Soviet era.

Appetizing products in Soviet times, of course, were. Many remember the taste of Soviet childhood with pleasure. Candied cranberries, sweet donuts... Others remember chocolate-covered curds or regular meatballs. But, what will we find in the shopping bag of a simple Soviet hostess who returns from the grocery store? A pack of vermicelli, a bar of margarine, a triangular package of milk, kefir in a glass bottle under green striped foil, or a pound of toffee.

But in stock there is always a can of stew. Where without her? The basis of the diet is not only soldiers, but the whole country.

Before the First World War, this stew was accumulated so much that it could be eaten for many, many more years. It was eaten by both whites and reds. And according to legend, Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, remembering the wonderful taste of stew, was one of those people who contributed to the start of its production already in the Soviet Union.

Soviet canned food - now lovers of delicacies make fun of them. But in the 30s it was a new unseen product. Cod liver, sprats in oil, and even salmon and crabs - the achievement of the people's commissar of the fishing industry, Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of the all-powerful Molotov.

We remember the wonderful posters of those years - "It's time for everyone to try how tasty and tender crabs are." To promote new products, the authorities resorted to a number of tricks, I would say, from the arsenal of today's political technologies. According to legend (and I have not seen documentary evidence of it anywhere), Molotov himself spoke at one of the party forums. And he voiced the “terrible truth”: smugglers are trying to take jewelry abroad in these same jars of canned food. Opening a jar of canned fish in front of those present, he took out a pearl necklace to the surprise of the audience. Needless to say, the demand for canned food in stores increased dramatically after that.
But over time, the delicious crabs disappeared. Caviar has become too expensive. And only horse mackerel and sprat remained in the public domain. Rumor has it that Margaret Thatcher herself, having visited the USSR, took this jar of sprats in tomato with her. For a test beloved cat.

You can list scarce Soviet products for a long time. It's easier to name something that has always been on the counter. Bread, pasta and milk ... True, it was often obtained with difficulty. But if the Soviet family was at the very least provided with milk, then there was a catastrophic lack of meat and butter. Nikas Safronov remembers well how he himself churned butter in his mother's homeland in Lithuania. “It was hard work. But you knew you were eating what you made yourself,” he says. The Safronov family also kept a goat. And the surplus milk was sold at the collective farm market - another salvation for Soviet housewives who needed to feed their families.

“From under the counter”, “from the back door”, “by pull” were the code words of that time. And if there is a familiar seller, and even better a butcher, then good food is provided in the family. An employee of Soviet trade is an enviable and coveted position for many. Warehouse manager, merchandiser, salesman - people who always ate delicious food in the USSR. And they fed their friends deliciously (for a fee, of course).

The extraction of scarce products was a real art, which many Soviet citizens mastered to perfection. The main thing here was the ability to converge with people. Nikas Safronov recalls a useful acquaintance with an employee of Eliseevsky, thanks to which delicacies appeared on his table. And it doesn't matter if there was money or useful acquaintances. It was a food chase with all its trappings - anticipation, excitement, adrenaline.

But the representatives of the Soviet elite did not need to make any gestures. They got the products easily, without much effort.

Since the end of the 1930s, the so-called therapeutic nutrition system has been introduced for the heads of ministries (People's Commissariats), departments, and party workers. What was she like? Well, let's say, in Moscow there were several canteens for the leadership. In which dinners were prepared - good, tasty, varied. But instead of these meals, you could take a food ration. And a lot of people preferred this option. There it was possible to get doctor's sausage from the Mikoyanovsky factory's special workshop known today to everyone, Finnish cervelat, and a dozen more varieties of sausages. There you could buy butter, cheese - without a queue, politely and culturally.

In fact, by the 1960s, these "canteens" had turned into "closed" stores for the nomenklatura. Once a month, the responsible employee was given a "book" with daily tear-off coupons. It cost about 150 rubles. But the whole secret was that the prices of this "healing food" were fixed at the level of the late 30s. It is not surprising that by the end of the 80s, when this system was destroyed, the real cost of these products was many times more expensive. Not to mention the fact that they were simply not available for general sale.

There's a lot more in the movie. Where were the most delicious fruits in the USSR. Why were bananas hidden from Soviet children? What is tastier - Soviet products or food from McDonald's? Why someone who was born in the USSR will never forget the taste of the right chocolate.

But the most pleasant thing for Soviet children was ice cream. What can you do to save money on your favorite treat? It was produced in the USSR in thousands of tons and all year round. But now familiar fruits fell into the children's diet only in certain seasons. In summer - apples, in winter - tangerines. After all, the main suppliers are the Union republics. Tangerines - from Abkhazia, apricots from Azerbaijan, "bull's heart" tomatoes from Krasnodar, Georgian jam from green nuts - all these are my childhood memories. And bananas were quite unusual. Moreover, their green immature color at that time did not bother anyone. The greenest ones were put in a dark closet or under the bed and waited for them to ripen. Sometimes they waited.

What imported products do you remember from that era, they asked me on set.

Perhaps, the Finnish Servelat, which has been in huge deficit since the late 70s. These are some products of the "countries of socialism". For example, Polish frozen vegetables for soup. Hungarian canned sausages with lecho sauce. I remember these jars, in which several thick sausages “stood” vertically, and all this was filled with red paprika sauce. It was some kind of fairy tale that sometimes fell on our table.

Why are all these products remembered with such warmth now?

Probably just because these tastes and pictures were from our childhood.

Here, some representatives of the current generation, who saw the Soviet Union at best from under the table, write about the horrors of the "scoop". Naturally, the topic of grub is in the first place for people who are unsatisfied with the stomach (with) PNS

But, unlike some, I will not scare people with other people's fairy tales, but I will write in the first person. About how an ordinary Soviet family "survived in the hungry years of the super-bloody regime": two parents and two children (my sister and I).

Necessary introduction. My parents come from the villages of the Omsk region, after graduating from the eight-year school, they went to the regional center, where they met while working at the Omsk tire plant. Most of the relatives remained in the village, this is important for understanding the further story.

As you can guess, my dad and mom worked as ordinary hard workers, they never even received a secondary education. By the way, when I was 3 and my sister was 5, the plant gave my parents a two-room apartment.

However, back to the main thing - to food. And so we ate.

We did not take meat in the market and in the store, we bought it in the village from relatives or acquaintances. In autumn, they took half a cow or half a pig at once, stored it in the cellar of the garage or in the garage itself. In the summer - in the freezer.
Almost every week, relatives from the village came to visit us, bringing with them some domestic chicken, some duck.
Also, at the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, dumplings were molded in industrial quantities.
For some time, my father kept rabbits in the country, which, as you know, are not only valuable fur.
Every year my father also bought lard in the village and smoked it, also at the dacha. Great snack!
As a result, meat was on the table every day.

We did not take sausages in the market and in the store, we bought them in the factory store. There, the workers were merchandised according to coupons, which were issued in a roll for a month at once.
I remember only boiled and Krakow sausage, I didn’t know the words “servilat” and “salami” then.
Sometimes parents made homemade sausage. True, I didn't like her.

Milk and sour cream

Bought at the store, it was my responsibility. Yes, it happened only in the morning, I had to stand in line, one dairy for the whole microdistrict.

In the store I saw only "sandwich" and on holidays. Parents bought cream with the same coupons at the factory.

I followed him to the store, bought a white roll and a half black roll. It took a couple of days.
Yes, there were queues for 10-15 people. Again - one bakery per neighborhood.
Yes, along with bread, I grabbed a kilogram bag of sugar - they saved up for jam.

Vegetables-fruits-berries

The second thing, after we were shattered by my sister, my parents took up the dacha. They took a plot of 6 acres, built a toilet and a house. This garden also fed us: raspberries, currants of all colors, strawberries, apples, plums, cherries, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, beets, zucchini, eggplants and more.
Much went into preparations, pickles, jams and compotes. The number of cans of preservatives in the cellar ran into the hundreds.

Potato

The plant allocated plots for planting, we planted 3-4 acres. They also kept potatoes in the cellar, enough for a year.

In the fall, they bought a couple of bags and the red day of November 7 was usually devoted to chopping and preparing for salting and pickling. Stored in a large barrel in the cellar. Apples were laid in layers in it - our favorite dessert.

Starting in August, my father and I on a motorcycle, and later - by car, every weekend went out to the forest before dawn. They usually collected 4-5 buckets of mushrooms: milk mushrooms, porcini and other aspen mushrooms.
Then they ate fried, but mostly salted or marinated.

Watermelons-oranges-pineapples

Bought in a vegetable store (yes, it was also in the singular). There were sometimes hourly queues.

They were terrible, except for the chocolate ones. They rarely ate them, jams for sweets and all sorts of rum women that were brought from the factory were enough.
By the way, New Year's gifts were cooler then than they are now.

One of my uncles kept an apiary, so there was also enough honey.

Alcohol

There were huge queues for beer and vodka, but we did not stand in them. Parents drove moonshine and put tinctures of excellent quality, all relatives praised.

School and catering

One impression: tasteless, insipid, but necessary. Except for lunches at school, I wasn't particularly fond of it.

Look like that's it?

Roughly speaking, we lived then with a semi-subsistence economy. Now much of this, as they say, we have outsourced.
Giving a diagnosis to socialism, then the transfer of small and medium-sized businesses to private hands would help it survive. Moreover, nothing new - this is the old and good NEP of Ilyich.
But, our liberals at one time decided to use a sharp transition to capitalism.